Kiva Update: Efrain Montuffar Olguin

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kiva update march 2008

Kiva has been providing loans to those in need in the developing world. The loans are a way of helping entrepreneurs find funding for projects in the absence of actual bank lending. Kiva provides a means by which people like you or me can put up the capital (albeit small amounts), pool the capital together and lend it to these micro-entrepreneurs. It’s very worthy as a charity. I’ve only loaned a small amount, but I’m happy to say that this is my second client, and he’s making every effort to pay back the loan. I do think this is a much better way to reach out and teach people how to fish, or at least lend them the money so that they can expand their fishing business, as it were.

Efrain borrowed $1200 about a year ago, and currently he’s repaid about 83% of this amount. It should be repaid on time. For more information, check out more about Efrain Montuffar Olguin and Kiva.org.

April Fools: Technorati, Safari, SRG, and Analytics – all borked

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t’s Tuesday, and I’m writing this after a rainy and slightly boring weekend in Taipei. Worse, with the continual seesaws of the temperature here, I’m thinking that I’ve got a cold coming on, so I’m going to take some medicine and go off to bed a little early.

In Recent Posts

In recent posts, Sunday was a little quiet on the blog as I spent the rainy day upgrading to Wordpress 2.5 which I’m using now for the first time , and enjoying it. On Saturday we went to the local Carrefour store in Tamsui for some shopping: Are retailers driving you ‘Potty’? and discovered that the store isn’t pricing items properly. For people suffering from less cash these days, I wrote about how a game I played helped educate me a great deal –Cash Low? Play CashFlow 101and learn why. Then I looked at how people in Taiwan used to borrow and lend money: a fascinating insight into how money circulates in societies without formal access to banking. The story is entitled: What’s a ‘hui’? How you can borrow and lend money in China, it also cites some discussions that others have had about ‘huis’. And in Tuesday’s News, I speculated about adopting WordPress 2.5 but now I find that I’m using it and loving it.

Crash Your Safari Browser!

Just discovered how easy it is to crash Safari 3.1, the latest browser from Apple. Mmm. Try this yourself.

Load up the browser. Wait until the homepage loads. Enter the letters in the following sequence: g m a i l (dot) g o o g l e (dot) c o m. Hit enter and …

flaky apple software

And I thought only Microsoft could manage that! I repeated this three times, and it worked each time! Try it! I’m not the first person to discover this, sadly. Enjoy.

On the theme of borked things, I can add at least four more today.

Analytics: 0 visitors!

borked analytics

According to this report in Analytics, I had 0 visitors on this day but somehow they recorded 75 visits. Wonder how that can be. I had noticed this a few days ago, and I have no idea what’s going on.

Technorati: Flaky again

Technorati is better known for its flakiness than either of the other two on today’s list. It completely missed two of my major posts the past five days, and just left me with two quotations… Geez. Are retailers driving you ‘Potty’? and Cash Low? Play CashFlow 101and learn why.

flaky technorati

SRG Archives

I also wanted to update the options in my theme for this plugin. But that is borked too! Look. When you check the options you can hit the ‘update’ button thus:

srg archives bug

But all I get after upgrading to WP2.5 is a blank screen with these words…

r u sure

Well, first, duh! If I wasn’t sure, I wouldn’t do it now would I? It’s hardly a big change to warrant such a request. And second… where is the answer box? Double-duh!

John Chow causes Browser Crashes

Last, you can visit John Chow’s recent post and find out why you have to crash out of your browser in his April Fool’s Day Prank. Unfortunately, he pissed off quite a number of people who lost their work because they clicked on through. Mmm. Is John’s blog finally going off the rails? Well, judge for yourself.

april fool

Be warned! If you are working on anything important before you visit the site in his URL bar, you MUST close the work and save it. Or vice versa. Guaranteed you will have to crash out of your browser to regain control. This could be a spiteful way to get back at someone! 👿

I’m sure that I can spend another hundred or thousand hours looking for bugs, and finding them. But these really are ones that have been bothering me the last few days! Oh, I didn’t mention ‘hosting’, did I? … Mmm.

Does technology make our life easier or not? Sometimes I wonder. What do you think?

WordPress 2.5: Five Things InvestorBlogger loves!

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There are a ton of posts about the new version of WordPress 2.5 , so I’m not going to do a post about that. There’s little point. Also, I’m not going to cover the same announcements. Other people do that just as well.

Here are some cool screenshots: these illustrate some of the surprises I found.

Nice looking dashboard

main dashboard

I love the new color scheme, I immediately adopted the standard colors, but I like the layout – it emphasizes why bloggers blog. I like the simplified format on the top command bar, though some things are counter-intuitive – why are the write buttons so far on the right? I do like the fact that users can change the RSS feeds in the dashboard (something I’ve longed to do for a while).

 

Simplified streamlined post management

manage posts

In the manage posts options, things are much clearer bar one feature. You can search the posts like before, but you need to click on the ‘status’ to view the post on the website. I also like how the comments are highlighted in the manage view. You can easily see how many comments a post has!

 

Neatly arranged blogging tools

blogging tools

In the post view, apart from the rearrangement that hides the complexity, the tools are nicely laid out and more beautifully presented. I didn’t see much difference in the arrangement except the headings on the far right are now visualized (nice touch!) and the media button which when clicked brings up the following media options in a new window.

 

Embedded Media Menu

insert media

And the fifth little treat came as rather a surprise.

 

Automated Plugin Updates

auto-update plugins

WP2.5 now allows you to update your plugins with one (or two) clicks: Just go to plugins, find any that need to be updated and press ‘update automatically’. And it was done. I was not looking forward to downloading any of the new plugins and manually updating them specially since several have almost daily updates (very annoying). That is neat.

 

This is a very refined tool now, and about as smooth as a fine red wine. Wonderful. Rather than writing a review about this, I’m just gushing! It’s a great improvement.

Upgrade if you can, want to or must!

So if you are starting a new blog, then you SHOULD just go to WordPress 2.5. It’s so much smoother in its operation, and you will find it easier to get started. If you are upgrading, I’d suggest updating provided that you don’t have any plugins that you absolutely need to use. If you do, you may wish to hold back until your favorite plugin is updated or patched or confirmed as working.